University of Minnesota Duluth
Distinguished Building Award Submission
The University of Minnesota Duluth campus is a series of connected buildings along a north-south axis. The resulting mega-building succeeds in protecting from harsh winters, but fails to create separate identities for the various schools and limits natural light and views. This project for a new business school shifts to an east-west axis, freeing itself from the original structure to provide natural light and views and define a new quadrangle between the academic buildings to the east and residential buildings to the west.
The programmatic components are articulated in their massing and material expression. A two-story base of administrative and instructional spaces is clad in weathering steel. Above this is a series of infilled horizontal concrete planes that house faculty offices, which extend over a road forming a new northern campus gateway. This material palette of weathering steel and exposed concrete evokes Duluth’s industrial history. The elliptical drum of the auditorium leads to a three-story lobby and gathering space, which introduces natural light through a north-facing roof monitor and provides informal interaction and break out spaces which support the formal teaching rooms. This space is linked back to the existing north-south circulation spine to provide continuity with the existing campus.
- Architect
- Perkins + Will
- Associate Architect
- Stanius Johnson Architects
- Client
- University of Minnesota Duluth
- Consultants
- Data Core Engineering
- Electronic Interiors, Inc.
- Gausman & Moore
- Meyer, Borgman and Johnson, Inc.
- oslund.and.assoc.
- Short Elliott Hendrickson Inc.
- The Weidt Group
- General contractor
- Oscar J. Boldt Construction
- Location
- Duluth, Minnesota
- Category
- Institutional
